Scheme Implementers

[Noah Lavine]

Hello all,

This is unusual as it is not really a Guile-specific message, but I
was reading recently about the r7rs process and then about SRFIs, and
I had an idea.

I think there should be a mailing list for people who implement
Schemes, to sort of coordinate our non-standard features. For
instance, you could email the list and say "hey, Guile is thinking of
adding a unicode library with this interface. Does anyone else want to
converge on an interface together?" Or better yet, "does anyone want
to cooperate in the making of this library?" (But that's less likely
because of license concerns, I suppose.)

As far as I can tell, there is nothing serving this purpose right now.
The SRFI process *begins* with a complete interface design, which
doesn't work for work in progress. The rnrs standardization process
only standardizes things that a lot of implementations have, so that
wouldn't work for this.

This would make things a lot nicer for people who use Scheme, because
more programs would be portable. It might also make life better for
people who implement Scheme, because it could make sharing work a lot
easier, and thus make every Scheme implementation better.

The implementation of this idea is trivial. I could set up a Google
group in five minutes, or any one of the Schemes which already host
their own mailing lists could add this.

So my question is, do people think this is a good idea or not? If so,
I will do it.

Noah